Royal Calkins: Reporting can uncover excess at city hall

Some people are saying it was a big victory for the news media last week when a jury convicted five former Bell officials on a variety of corruption charges.

The charges were the direct result of an investigation by Los Angeles Times reporters who dug into city files to document inflated salaries and various official and unofficial plots to loot the bedroom community in the midst of the Southern California sprawl.

Not to take anything away from the reporters, but I see it differently. If the Los Angeles Times had been covering Bell and surrounding communities, like South Gate and Cudahy and Maywood, the way it did once upon a time, the crooked officials wouldn't have been able to get their schemes started.

Twenty years ago, the Times had at least a couple of reporters assigned to that part of the megalopolis. There weren't enough of them to cover every meeting of the Bell City Council, but they were able to pop in, check agendas and cover the most important news.

A reporter with any city hall experience would have noticed the city was starting to pay council members more than other cities did and that the city manager was making more than managers of the largest cities. Routine reporting on it could have prevented the excesses well before it became necessary to send in some of the newspaper's top investigators.

Back then, the Times and some suburban papers assigned reporters to cover the city elections. Not any more. The Times, like most other U.S. media operations, started trimming expenses and staff about a decade ago. When it had to choose which cities to cover, it went with affluent Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades over scruffy Vernon and Compton.

It was minor belt-tightening at first, but the trimming soon turned into slashing. On average, U.S. newsrooms have lost about half of their employees in the past 10 years.

This is good news for the bad guys. When there are no reporters skulking around, asking for audit reports and looking at purchase orders, it essentially means no one is doing any of that. There are exceptions, of course. Advocacy groups such as LandWatch and research groups such as the League of Women voters do their own skulking. Much of the troubling practices uncovered at the Fort Ord Reuse Authority in the past year was found by lawyers for the Keep Fort Ord Wild group.

But those organizations tend to focus only on the big-ticket items. They're not sending anyone to Del Rey Oaks Planning Commission meetings or Pacific Grove budget sessions, and neither are the local newspapers and TV stations.

The point here isn't to make anyone feel sorry for the press. That will never happen. Instead, feel sorry for yourselves, because the economic status of the news-gathering industry is denying all of us much of the information we need to make sound decisions about local governance and those in charge of it.

The citizenry needs to know that the lack of scandalous news stories about your town's leadership does not mean nothing scandalous is going on. Here at The Herald, we remain devoted to rooting out as much of it as possible. It is a key part of our mission. But until the news biz makes a dramatic rebound or some other form of news gathering is invented, we will be increasingly reliant on an alert and communicative citizenry to help keep 'em honest.